The lyrics end with Joni alone in a motel room - alone, in a place one
goes to on a journey, alone in a place where one goes with a lover, she
is alone.
Dreams, dreams, and false alarms... whatever Joni had hoped for,
whatever her dream was, it was crashed, it had crashed (see penultimate
verse), just as Amelia Earhart had a dream, a journey she wished to
make, she flew in the icy altitutdes, and her dream crashed and she was
alone - and dead.
Amelia was the pioneer woman who had a dream in man's world, Joni has
her dreams in an induistry also male dominated and they both pushed the
limits of doing it their war. I see the song "Amelia" as an elergy, as
an evocation of a place that Joni is in, an emotional or psychological
place, where seeing the ending of a dream. The dream may have been, for
Joni, a happy relationship. Whatever it was, it had crashed and Joni's
dream, like Amelia's, ended in futility.
A related, somewhat opposite, image appears in the movie The Great Waldo
Pepper, made about the same time, where in the end Waldo has
accomplished his dream and flies off in his bi-plane into a cloud,
alone, never to land; his bi-plane lost its landing gear, but the crash
that is to come (and kill him) is meaningless as Waldo has accomplised
his dreams and flies off, alone, in the cloud.
The above: all IMHO.
Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune has written of that song as if it is the
one that moves him the most. Even my very obtuse former partner, who
said when we were halfway through the S&L video, "have we had enough
Joni?," was caught by the poignancy of that song.
Amelia, whether we understand the words, we all understand what she
feels, what she is saying beyond the mere words with her music, with the
entire sound. Like an opera, we don't need to understand the words to
relate to the emotion. That is why IMHO "Amelia" is one of Joni's most
moving songs.
(the Rev) Vince
